by Zev Chafets
Rush’s fun, as always, came in the studio. An evangelist in Ohio claimed that the theme song for the old Mister Ed television series (“A horse is a horse, of course, of course . . .” ) contained a satanic message when played backward. Limbaugh told his audience about it and informed them a Slim Whitman recording played backward also contained a message from the devil. To his delight, a lot of listeners took him seriously, calling the station to report that they were trashing all their Whitman albums to “keep the devil out of the house.”
The Limbaugh persona, which had been germinating since the “Jeff Christie School for DJs” in Pittsburgh, flowered in Sacramento. Limbaugh became “El Rushbo, the all-knowing, all-caring, all-sensing Maha Rushi,” “a harmless little fuzzball,” and the “Epitome of Morality and Virtue.” His show was carried “across the fruited plain” on the (fictitious) Excellence in Broadcasting Network, from behind the golden EIB microphone. He was on “the cutting edge of societal evolution,” “serving humanity” with “talent on loan from God,” and opinions “documented to be almost always right, 97.9 percent of the time” by the Sullivan Group (another fictitious entity named for local DJ and Limbaugh buddy Tom Sullivan).
The stylized, satirical lingo began then, too. He mocked the multicultural style of California by proposing to keep “Uglo-Americans” off the streets. Militant feminists became “Feminazis.” The green movement was full of “environmental whackos,” the American left became “Commie pinko liberals,” and the residents of Rio Linda, California, were synonymous with stupidity. A ringing “Dadelut! Dadelut! Dadelut!” introduced news updates on what he regarded the absurdities of liberal activism. Liberals, of course, hated him, which he found inspiring. When they attacked him as a dimwit, he responded by claiming that he was so much smarter than his critics that he could vanquish them “with half my brain tied behind my back, just to make it fair.”
Bruce Marr saw that Limbaugh had the ability to go beyond Sacramento and introduced him to Ed McLaughlin, the former head of ABC Radio. McLaughlin had started his own company, and he was syndicating the Dr. Dean Edell Show nationally. He agreed with Marr that Limbaugh had the potential to go national as well. McLaughlin offered a partnership. Rush brought in his brother, David, to work out the details. The arrangement made a fortune for both Limbaugh and McLaughlin, and revolutionized the style and content of American radio.
But first Limbaugh had to get out of Sacramento. His contract with KBFK stipulated that he could leave only to accept an offer by a top-market station. But city stations wanted local programming, not shows aimed at a national audience. McLaughlin came up with an ingenious solution. Limbaugh would go to WABC in New York, where he would do a local program, essentially for free. In return, the ABC Radio Networks would carry a second, national program each day on its affiliates.
The New York City show started in July 1988. A month later, on August 1, the national program followed on fifty-six stations in second-tier markets with a total of about 250,000 listeners. The EIB Network was on the air. It had been twenty-one years since Rusty Sharpe’s first show in Cape Girardeau. He was thirty-seven years old, and he had finally made it to what he hoped would be the big time.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE CITY
Limbaugh came to New York with trepidation. “I decided to leave Sacramento in April but didn’t go till July,” he told a reporter for the Sacramento Bee. “I realized that everything I’d been searching for in seventeen years I’d found in Sacramento in the last year and a half. Friends. Security. Stability. A house.” After being fired in Pittsburgh, Limbaugh had retreated to Cape; in Sacramento, with New York looming, he once more holed up. “I got so depressed, I guess you could say I sat around the house in my underwear, sulking,” he said.
Bryan Burns had moved to New York. One Saturday morning he got a call from Limbaugh. “You’re not going to believe this,” Rush said, “but we’re moving to New York City. Can you help us find a place to live?”
“Rush and Michelle came to town, and my wife and I took them all over the city looking at places,” says Burns. “Finally we found an apartment near Lincoln Center for twenty-seven hundred dollars a month.” The flat was still occupied and wouldn’t be ready for a few months, so Ed McLaughlin found Limbaugh a suite at the Parker Meridien Hotel.
Professionally Limbaugh was more than ready for the big city. His technique and timing, honed during thousands of hours on the air, were flawless. Studio engineers at ABC were impressed to find that he knew almost as much about the latest broadcasting technology as they did. His voice, shorn of its regional accent through practice, was a fine instrument. And he had a great selection of bumper music. Like Lee Atwater, George H. W. Bush’s hard-driving political consultant, Limbaugh understood that cool music could make a conservative message seem contemporary and energetic.
All these tools were necessary for success but not nearly sufficient. New York was full of disc jockeys with musical taste, good voices, and broadcasting chops, but no one—in Manhattan or anywhere else—was doing unabashed, balls-to-the-wall right-wing satire. That was Limbaugh’s niche, and he seized it immediately.
Limbaugh brought with him from Sacramento the same style he uses today—unscripted, free-flow monologues on the topical issues of the moment, full of demeaning nicknames (Ted Kennedy, for example, was “the swimmer”), wicked imitations and parodies, relentless mockery of the mainstream media, unabashed Republican partisanship, and a willingness to transgress almost every kind of political correctness. But, beyond this bag of tricks, there was a bedrock seriousness of belief that came not from his years on the road, but from his home in Cape Girardeau.
In 1988, before coming to New York, Limbaugh published a column in the now-defunct Sacramento Union titled “35 Undeniable Truths.” It read like an eclectic and sometimes whimsical collection of axioms and pronouncements by Thomas Hobbes (“War is not obsolete; ours is a world governed by the aggressive use of force” ); Howard Cosell (“The greatest football team in the history of civilization is the Pittsburgh Steelers of 1975- 1980; the L.A. Raiders will never be the team that they were when they called Oakland home” ); Billy Graham (“There is a God; abortion is wrong; morality is not defined and cannot be defined by individual choice; evolution cannot explain Creation” ); John D. Rockefeller (“There will always be poor people. This is not the fault of the rich” ); Norman Mailer (“Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society” ); General George Patton (“The US will again to war. There is no such thing as war atrocities. War itself is an atrocity. The only way to get rid of nuclear weapons is to use them” ); a high school history teacher (“Abraham Lincoln saved this nation” ); Paul McCartney (“Love is the only human emotion that cannot be controlled” ); and Thomas Jefferson (“Freedom is God given” ).
By far the greatest number of “undeniable truths” came from the anti-Communist dinner table rants of Big Rush: “The greatest threat to humanity lies in the nuclear arsenal of the USSR. The greatest threat to humanity lies in the USSR. Peace does not mean the elimination of nuclear weapons. Peace does not mean the absence of war. Peace can’t be achieved by developing an ‘understanding’ with the Russian people. When Americans oppose America, it is not always courageous and sacred; it is sometimes dangerous. Communism kills. In the USSR, peace means the absence of opposition. To free peoples, peace means the absence of threats and the presence of justice. The Peace Movement in the United States—whether by accident or design—is pro-Communist. The only difference between Mikhail Gorbachev and previous Soviet leaders is that Gorbachev is alive. Soviet leaders are just left-wing dictators. To more and more people, a victorious United States is a sinful United States. This is frightening and ominous. You should thank God for making you an American; and instead of feeling guilty about it, help spread our ideas worldwide.”
And, as Big Rush certainly believed, “The collective knowledge and wisdom of seasoned citizens is the most valuable
—yet untapped—resource our young people have.”
Very few of Rush Limbaugh’s “truths” were the product of personal observation or experience. His life had been remarkably untouched by many of the affiliations and responsibilities of his generation. He had been a Cub Scout (under pressure) for one year and quit without earning a single merit badge. He was on the high school football team for a season and then dropped out. He spent one year in college, living at home. He never served in the army or the Peace Corps, had not traveled abroad (and, in fact, had only been in New York once, on a three-day business trip, before moving there), and did not belong to any church or clubs. He also had no children. Since his midteens he had spent his life in the circumscribed environment of top-40 AM radio, with a few years in the marketing department of the Royals. While he was in the studio, or at the ballpark, the world and the American culture were in a state of exceptional flux.
Rusty Limbaugh’s reaction to the events of 1968—an apolitical shrug, conversations with newsmen about how he could break into big-time broadcasting—became Rush’s pattern. He did not participate, one way or the other, in the great causes of his time. The civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, Stonewall, the feminist revolution, political assassinations, Watergate, Jimmy Carter, even the Reagan counterrevolution didn’t engage him until he was nearly forty. He had his opinions, of course. Once a station manager in Pittsburgh cautioned him not to talk positively about Richard Nixon on the air. He read newspapers and kept up but didn’t talk politics with his roommates or his closest friends, like George Brett. He was so detached and apolitical that he didn’t register to vote until he was thirty-five years old.
When he did begin talking about politics, in Kansas City, he reached for the doctrines he had been raised on. That they were not original or less absolutely true than he imagined was secondary; what mattered, what was unusual, was that he was a talking disc jockey with a coherent, conservative credo. They were an honest representation of how Limbaugh saw the world. They also were sufficiently overstated to give him a plausible, Alilike, just-kidding deniability when it suited him.
Limbaugh came to New York with many ambitions, not all of them complementary. First, he wanted to become the country’s leading radio personality, and he accomplished that in short order. Within five years, Playboy noted that his show was so widespread on the American air that it ought to come with its own environmental-impact statement. By most standards he was rich and famous, but not by the standards of Manhattan. In interviews he gave in the early 1990s, he often remarked on how disconcerting it was for him, after his celebrity in Sacramento, to go unrecognized on the streets of New York.
He was especially hurt and disappointed by the rejection of his peers. Limbaugh arrived believing that there was an elite club of broadcasters (“not media people, broadcasters,” he says) who would recognize his ability and welcome him into their fraternity with fellowship and camaraderie. “These guys had millions of listeners every night. I looked up to them. I wanted to be accepted as one of them. But that’s not what happened.” In fact, the only mainstream broadcasters who were even remotely welcoming were Tim Russert and Ted Koppel.
Limbaugh was right: there was (and is) a broadcast elite in New York with connections to one another (not always friendly) and other very important people in the arts and entertainment, the news business, politics, publishing, academia, and Wall Street. Outsiders are always welcome—Walter Cronkite himself came from Missouri; Tom Brokaw, from Nebraska; and Peter Jennings, from Canada, of all places—but the price of admission is accepting and, in some small way propagating, the group ethos. Get in and you become eligible for prizes and awards, college commencement gigs, famous neighbors, social respectability (if not popularity), front-row-center seats, and great tables. In that respect, acceptance by the Manhattan media elite is not different from membership in any high school in-crowd. Dobie Gray sang about the experience on a hit record Rusty Sharpe used to spin: “You ain’t been nowhere ’til you’ve been in . . . with the in crowd, yeah!”
Internalizing the lyrics of hit songs is an occupational hazard for disc jockeys. Besides, Dobie Gray didn’t spell out the Manhattan rules. Members of the club had to be (and still have to be) secular, socially liberal, politically Democratic (or at least not Republican), aspirationally Ivy League, discreetly avaricious, and unwilling to express opinions not sanctioned by the editorial page of the New York Times. Of these values, Limbaugh shared only avarice. There was precisely no chance that he could ever be accepted, even if he wasn’t simultaneously using his show to mock and satirize them as members of the mainstream (later, “Drive-By,” and currently, “State-Run”) media.
Limbaugh’s “truths” resonated with millions of Americans, which is how he built his audience. But in Manhattan they sounded weird, offensive, or just plain crazy. “What does he mean, evolution can’t explain creation? Who is this guy, William Jennings Bryan (and wasn’t Spencer Tracy great in the movie)? God created the world? Everyone knows the world was created by a big bang and tiny protozoa. That’s settled science.” And how about: “Morality isn’t a matter of individual choice? What’s that supposed to mean, that all lifestyles aren’t equally valid?”
The most infamous of Limbaugh’s dicta was Number 24: “Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society.” The most politically charged was: “Abortion is wrong.” Those were fighting words in Manhattan, atomic invitation killers.
When Limbaugh began his show he got relatively little attention in the New York press. AM radio was considered a second-rate medium. Don Imus and Howard Stern were listened to, but they were on during drive-time, not during the middle of the day. In his early days in New York, Limbaugh continued with his invention of a new form of radio, but the supposedly cutting edge critics of the big city didn’t even notice. And those who did pay attention didn’t like what they were hearing.
Soon after his national show went on the air, Limbaugh got a message from his partner and mentor, Ed McLaughlin. According to Rush, the management of the Parker Meridien wanted him to leave. “They think you’re an anti-Semite,” McLaughlin told him.
Limbaugh was dumbstruck by the accusation. In Cape the Limbaughs lived next to a Jewish family, and they all got along just fine. If there had been prejudice, it had worked in the opposite direction. In high school, David Limbaugh had a mad crush on the girl next door. When her disapproving parents found out about it, after graduation they had her shipped off to a college where she could find a suitable—i.e., Jewish—husband.
Rush hadn’t socialized with many Jews on his long journey down the AM highway or in the front office of the Kansas City Royals; neither is a particularly Jewish milieu. They simply weren’t on his radar, nor was he on theirs. One Sunday night Limbaugh saw a 60 Minutes segment about the power of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington, done in reporter Mike Wallace’s tabloid style. It is doubtful that Limbaugh was even aware that Wallace was Jewish (Wallace himself doesn’t advertise it) or that the piece was meant to be negative. Limbaugh knew very little about the nuances of the American-Middle East discourse. He liked Israel for the same reason that most Americans did—it was pro-American, anti-Communist, democratic, and the land of the Bible. What was there not to like?
The following day on his show, Limbaugh riffed on the power of various lobbies in Washington. He wasn’t putting it down; in his world lobbying is a constitutional right. But someone at one of New York’s Jewish organizations heard about the broadcast and put out the word that the new right-wing broadcaster at WABC was a Jew-hater. To many New York Jewish liberals it was (and remains) an article of faith that conservative Republicans are anti-Semites by definition. This belief has transcended every possible proof to the contrary, including the obvious fact that hostility to Israel and its supporters in the United States is almost entirely located on the “progressive left.”
A campaign was quickly mounted. People called the station, sent letters o
f protest to advertisers, and complained to the management of the Parker Meriden, which declared Limbaugh persona non grata . . .
Needless to say, he was disconcerted. “This incident did not cause me to feel any animus,” he told me years later. “If anything, it frightened me. The message for me in this story is my discovery of those very clichés [“conservatives” equal “racists,” “sexists,” “bigots,” “homophobes,” “anti-Semites”] attached to me when they weren’t true. Remember, this happened when I had only fifty-six radio stations . . . and in the following two years I felt the full force, nationwide, of being associated with those clichés simply because of my politics . . . I had no idea how to deal with it. And no one to advise me how to deal with it.”
Limbaugh informed his listeners that he was the target of a campaign. But one day, a listener, Nathan Segal, an Orthodox rabbi from Staten Island, called the station and got Limbaugh on the phone. “I heard what you said; you haven’t done anything wrong,” Segal told him. “I will protect you.” It was the start of a friendship that has lasted more than twenty years.
“One of the instigators of the campaign against Rush was the actor Ron Silver,” says Segal. That was ironic. Silver, who had been the president of the progressive Creative Coalition, eventually quit the group, in part because of its coolness toward Israel and its opposition to the war in Iraq. In 2004 he delivered a speech at the Republican National Convention endorsing President Bush’s Mideast policies, for which Silver was widely ostracized by the “artistic” community.
An accusation of anti-Semitism, even an unfair one, was nothing to take lightly in the media world of New York. Limbaugh was right to be frightened by the damage it could do. The effort to smear him as a Jew-hater persisted, and eventually he confronted it head on, publicly offering a million dollars to anyone who could demonstrate that he was, in any way, an anti-Semite. Not long after that challenge, Abe Hirschfeld, an eccentric millionaire, bought the New York Post. It was a scandal—Hirschfeld was not only a kook but a lowlife; he eventually went to prison for trying to have his ex-business partner murdered. Limbaugh, in discussing the sale of the Post, mistakenly referred to Hirschfeld as “Irv.” When he was corrected by a member of his staff, he said, “Irv, Abe, what’s the difference?” A listener in California heard this and demanded to collect the million dollars. Limbaugh refused, the listener sued, and the case was laughed out of court.
